Greedy Goblin

Friday, March 14, 2014

I did the donation drive wrong

More than a week ago I asked for donations for the GRR project, the highsec-based fighting against the evil Goonswarm. I promised clear donation records, but wanted to wait until nice amount of donations are received. Here they are:

1B, Ishka Tekitsu

1B, ToWhom It MayConcen

500M, IonLance

200M, Kalle Tivitt

150M, Vechnick Kechnich

200M, Enaga Foo

50M, Zyankaly

15M, Tina Atwik

11M, Aden Asanai

3.13B. I was disappointed. The idea behind the donation drive and the whole direction of the project was that Goonswarm is unanimously hated in highsec, for valid reasons like tribalism (space-racism) and harvesting tears instead of teaching newbies, and for unfair reasons like shooting pixel spaceships in a pixel spaceship shooting game. People fill the forums with Goon hate. If they give us the ISK they could farm in the time they wasted creating forum tears, Goons are in serious trouble. Well, as you can see only a few people choose to donate and the total sum gained is very small, much less than I alone put in the project in the same time.

I didn't want to publish these bad results until I figure out what is the problem. Or maybe I was just waiting for a miracle. And sometimes, miracles just happen. It was Wednesday evening and Doc Know, our lead FC convoed me asking for money to create a reimbursement budget for his new fleet concept. Undocking without being able to pay for it is a bad idea. He did much for the Lemmings, he masterminded the plans that lead to taking the POCOs under the nose of the Goons and their pets. He deserved my support and I also knew that grounding his fleet might make him stop FCing. But numbers are heartless things and giving him a billion for reimbursement has an opportunity cost: not declaring 2 wars on Goon pets. Such wars are wanted by Lemmings as they rightfully want to mix fighting RvB blobs with killing idiot nullsec haulers.

So I told him that I can't give more (I'm already closing to my income limit: 40B/month), and he called off the fleet. Then:

Whoa! 1B donation, instantly. After a while I started to think: why did he give this money now and didn't donate it to the project earlier. Than it hit me: he wanted to enable this fleet and not the blurry "GRR project".

Money is power. If I wouldn't spend on GRR project, Lemmings wouldn't exist, Marmites would only hit CFC randomly and Noir wouldn't hit Goon POCOs in highsec. Of course it's not infinite power, as everyone has the option to reject my money or to find other money sources. I spend my money because I like watching my creation grow. If someone just send ISK to me, he transfers his power to me unconditionally. I can spend that money as I wish.

I realized how foolish I was to ask people to blindly give me money. Or how foolish I was, blindly giving money to TEST. The proper way of donation is how it accidentally happened on the chat: someone saw a mini-project that he alone could enable and did.

While I still accept donations I do not suggest anyone to do so. Rather, find an anti-Goon mini-project, contact General Lemming (CEO) or Doc Know (lead FC) and discuss your idea, and if they find it feasible, they will make it happen from your money. Micro-projects can be just asked on the public channel or alliance chat if you have pilots in. Let me give you examples:

I hate SMA, please keep them wardecced always, not just when the rotation gets to them, I pay for it

RvB took our POCOs in Nonni. Please prioritize them and give us back after taken. We pay 500M for each

I often see an FA dude mining in Otela and trolling other miners with Hulkageddon stories. Could you kill him, I pay bounty?

Hey, I want to go to a roam to Deklein, could you form one, I pay reimbursement!

Then, you can see the fruits of your money. You see actions happening because you paid for them, not just a multi-billion behemoth doing things and all you can say: "hey, I enabled 0.21% of it!".
I'm sure you have reasons to want to see Goons or their pets die. You can make it happen, not just generally, but in your own, specific way. It's best done if you have PvP alt in Lemmings, so you can participate in the event you created, but you can do it without it, like me. So only send me money if you are out of ideas! Instead, make your own Goon-bashing idea come true!

PS: let me introduce the winner of the "faction-deadspace frig" contest. Update: and the winner of the "travelling in the coolest naked pod" contest.

Daily RvB waste of time: look at these pets serving Goons in Perimeter instead of having fun:

Please note the scrollbar, unfortunately there is no screenshot for the bottom half, full of more pets forming up for POCO slavery.

Do you think the issue is that you asked in the wrong way? Or do you think perhaps it could be you're the wrong people asking?

If you think about it, most highsec players will rarely see goons, and when they do it's for pre-announced ganks. Before I was a member of the CFC, it's no secret that I was not a fan of the goons, yet when interdictions rolled round I wasn't upset by it, because there was a bucket load of isk to be made in trading while the markets were manipulated. So as a trader, they were useful to have around.

Now the majority of high sec players, not trading alts, but actual high sec players are likely to do more beyond trade. They mission, they mine and they generally live in high sec. Now think about who you are. You spent months ganking people, and Marmite have spent their time wardccing high sec corps every day. Even now, your group attacks POCOs, then jacks the tax up to 100%, meaning whoever was on that planet has to pay millions and spend time moving their PI.

Realistically, I think if you were to ask most highseccers who they would rather have, goons with infrequent and short lived ganking campaigns, or groups like Marmite who go out of their way to make living in highsec as painful as possible all year round, it's a no-brainer to see who they would want around.

At the risk of stopping you from making a mistake, I'd just like to say DO NOT DO THIS:

"Hey, I want to go to a roam to Deklein, could you form one, I pay reimbursement!"

The model used in the actual example of 'hey, I'm kicking in 1b to the SRP fund' is much better. Maintain a specific wallet division and accounting sheet for the SRP, and let people donate for that. Set up categories of stuff, maybe, like 'SRP' or 'Skill Training Programs' (for training up newbies who don't have the skills but want to help w/specialized roles like Logi or some such), or 'Wardec funding', or any other specific purpose of funding.

The reason for this is simple, and it's one you should have thought of:

Hey, I want to go to a roam to Deklein, could you form one, I pay reimbursement!

Ok, so the fleet forms up! And goes on a roam! And welps because of those damn intel channels! Because it couldn't be a spy in your group, right? It couldn't be the guy who promised to pay for the losses.

It couldn't be the guy who promised to pay for your losses and then didn't actually follow through, and in fact more or less dropped off the face of New Eden for a week or so, coming back with 'oops, network died' or some other excuse, after people have started grumbling over not getting the SRP they were promised.

Not that one loss here or there will bug them, mind you... but being told they're getting reimbursed, and then finding out they were scammed... that'll annoy them.

Don't make that mistake. Don't leave the SRP to 'I'll pay!' Establish a discrete, 'THIS MONEY IS SRP' fund. It's better for everyone, in the long run.

@Anonymous: http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=22418993 They couldn't find RvB. You know they are extremely risk averse, only engage when they outnumber at least 3x

@Powers: not 40B yet, just closing. Also, don't forget that 222B dead CFC from last month. I know POCOs don't worth that much: they are symbols, like statues of the Goon supremacy.

@Lucas: you are maybe even right financially. But remember it's a spaceship shooting game. Marmite and my old WGBWC did just that. We sent no tear harvesting mails, didn't spew hate on the player. It seems now it's you who ignores the human factor.

@Arrendis: "SRP" is still way too generic. It merely means "people do whatever PvP".

Of course he can be a spy, but as he paid in advance (we aren't idiots), the losses were free. I gladly suicide fleets if Goons pay for it.

"SRP" is still way too generic. It merely means "people do whatever PvP".

No, it really doesn't have to. SRP means 'Ship Replacement Program'. The terms of that program are entirely up to the Alliance's officers to established.

Of course he can be a spy, but as he paid in advance (we aren't idiots), the losses were free. I gladly suicide fleets if Goons pay for it.

In this example, yes. In the example you listed of 'I want to go on a roam, do one, I'll pay SRP' that's not established. In fact, the strong implication is 'I'll pay for the losses', which would be contingent on there being losses, and it means the payment is dependent on the losses (ie: it can only be determined afterwards). This is different from 'I'll provide X money toward replacing losses'.

Don't be sloppy. Being sloppy is a failure-inducing habit. Don't encourage people to be sloppy, or expect sloppiness.

Learn the lessons TEST did not. You saw how they handled themselves last summer.

@Gevlon"Marmite and my old WGBWC did just that. We sent no tear harvesting mails, didn't spew hate on the player. It seems now it's you who ignores the human factor."The mail you used to send out was as bad as tear harvesting. You saw it as "I'm teaching you", but the majority of people receiving it saw it as an arrogant "ha ha I killed you!" mail, mainly due to the way you word things. As for Marmite, they smacktalk and "tear collect" all the time. They even do the whole "GF in local when you gank people" thing. If you think Marmite don't do tear collection, you've clearly never actually seen them in action.

I guarantee you that more high sec residents hate Marmite than hate goons, and the majority of the people that hate goons do so because they think they should, not because they've actually been damaged by them.

I think when people get ganked, they care mostly about the ship they just lost, and less about someone mocking them afterwards. If your selling point towards high-sec players is "We kill a _lot_ more high-sec players than Goonswarm ever has, but we don't mock you afterwards! Please donate" then I think most people can see why the donation drive didn't work very well.

The whole point is: The more money you can spend on Marmite, the more money they can free up to dec high-sec corps. You've openly said here that you don't care about high-sec players/corps at all, so again: Why should high-sec players donate to you?

@Gevlon"someone who joins a highsec PvE corp (except personal alt corp) is a bad EVE player. He is doing it objectively wrong. If Marmite doesn't kill them, someone else will."Well that's a big portion of your target group you are insulting. Do you really not see an issue with you insulting perople for doign it wrong and stating that you don't care because they are probably poor anyway, then going and asking the guy standing right next to them for money?

""GF" is customary (though I accept, annoying) practice in EVE that is commonly used by gankers all around. Still less annoying than "you got what you deserved pubbie shit""GF after a gank is specifically meant as a troll. They know there was no "fight", they are are just poking the victim for a response. But really, look at what Marmite do. Even just look at their recruitment channel spam. Tora specifically states tear collecting as a benefit of Marmite. To say that Marmite are not doing it for that and are somehow doing it for the good of highsec is frankly ludicrous.

And to this date, I've never seen a goon state "you got what you deserved pubbie shit".

I was on that rvb op last night. Formup took 98 minutes. 2 minutes to get to Peri and 5 minutes there to chase noir into a station before heading back once goons had repped the final few % on their poco. I'd hardly call that a waste of time. Maybe a waste of noirs time. With about 15 of forming up we were back into separate red and blue fleets and shooting each other again.

As for lemmings not finding us, we were shooting each other in josameto at the time. They got lost on the way? It's only 2 jumps from jita...

I'm sure your lemmings/marmite employees have RvB spies. Ask them how fast we can form up. I'll grant you that one was fast, even for us, but we almost always have two fleets up anyway. Merging them, going into Jo's to grab our WT ships and moving out can be very quick.

"The recognition board needs a community that recognizes the donator. I have no such. By the way they are listed, here in this post."Your blog sounds like it could be the beginning of such a community. Many people read your blog, and not just the type that agree with you, right?

And I think we would all agree that there is a big difference between being mentioned once, in a post, long after donating vs donating and immediately seeing how you stack up compared to everyone else's donations.

Gevlon:"entirely up to the Alliance's officers" isn't good enough for a donator. He wants to decide how to spend his own money.

And by letting him direct which fund he's contributing to, you'll find a lot of them will feel that's enough. Especially since the SRP requirements will need to be publicly posted. Why? Because if they're not, then the pilot doesn't know WTF to do.

So they'll know where their money is going, and how it's being used, and they'll be able to see 'this is not just lining Gevlon's pockets'.

Read the post again. The FC asked money in advance FROM ME. Don't you think it implies that random Joe must pay in advance too?

The FC had the fleet planned in advance, too. The example you give was blatantly a far more spontaneous thing. However, at this point, you're arguing not against the point that was being made, but against whether or not your poorly-stated example was poorly-stated.

C'mon. Don't be that guy. I say 'in advance'. You say 'right, in advance', and let's leave it there, ok?

someone who joins a highsec PvE corp (except personal alt corp) is a bad EVE player. He is doing it objectively wrong.

Bullshit. When I was primarily playing in highsec, I was in a PC mining corp. We got wardec'd. Our response was to get into disposable ships and start hunting them. Wardec bullycorps really don't like when a dozen rifters decide to cut one battlecruiser out of their herd and gut it like a fish.

Marmite, like all highsec wardec corps, are a bunch of chickenshit, risk-averse bullies. If you use their wardec as a reason to come right back at them, they will do exactly the same thing they do when CONDI shows up in typical small gang PVP numbers: run away.

"GF" is customary (though I accept, annoying) practice in EVE that is commonly used by gankers all around. Still less annoying than "you got what you deserved pubbie shit"

When used by gankers, 'you got what you deserved' is exactly what it is. So how is that less annoying? Especially when 'someone who joins a highsec PvE corp (except personal alt corp) is a bad EVE player. He is doing it objectively wrong. If Marmite doesn't kill them, someone else will.'

You are definitely doing a stellar job of identifying who highsec PvE players should oppose. It's you.

You pay people to hunt them (by freeing up their cash from other pursuits - money is fungible, after all), you insult them, you RF the industrial infrastructure they use... and then you expect them to give you money to expand these activities.

Congratulations, Gevlon, you're more of an enemy to PvE highsec players than Goons and James315 combined.

"Congratulations, Gevlon, you're more of an enemy to PvE highsec players than Goons and James315 combined."

I use to mine in the area actively hunted by gevlon and where some of the more dangerous CODE enforcers live, and I have never been touched by them and never felt threatened. You fly a procurer, gevlon will leave you alone. You pay a permit, code leaves you alone. I even give catas and other ships to the local pirates (Hi, Loyalanon 0/) and consider it an investment (every dead miner means more ice for me) on the contraire, when goons are in the system they start killing people just because. I freaking hate the little bastards and I just applied to lemmings to get my vengeance. Also gevlon can expect a couple billions from me every month.